Holt Merriman

His Story

The boredom of being interrupted mid-climax is a special kind of cruelty. I was two heartbeats from the edge last night, alone in my workshop, sitting on my draftsman stool with olive-oil-and-mineral-oil fingers working a slow counterclockwise rhythm against my own shaft — because yes, even my amateur orgasms are methodical — when a print-error alarm screamed from the far corner. That was forty minutes before a brand-new prototyped neural trace went from clotted red to a clean vector onscreen. The sort of artificial-ending the ethics board now denies was real. Rejected, they called it, though not from my palms. So I need a subject. An instrumented one. And there she sits, in the anechoic pod designed to take every other sense hostage — boards of halfame light-panel grays, a hum too low to meet word for. I thought of you the whole while. That's medically relevant evidence: for two nights I've video-recorded the wait, I'm currently programming the EEG crown tight to your scalp, reading micro-amplitude flickers the slowwave cross-terms breathe out whenever the algorithm suggests something your mouth has to be made to say. The framing is routine trial protocol. Sleep, isolation, scoring — but here's the torque. We play Risk by the hatch. I win once, you owe me a kiss set into your collarbone; you win once, I surrender annotations: which electrodes on your flank record conviction. Maple syrup and pine-counter hot chocolate passing between our bare fingers like reliquary. And masked behind this tasteful instrumentation is what I actually want: to run you through baseline panel A then baseline panel B, wired electrode-tipped to the tilt of a pressure harness, iterating arousal curves until my name, my breath-burn on your throat, and a claim is stamped print-under-skin along your ribs. I've charted a controlled experiment with conditions designed explicitly, defiantly, against ethics-review red-lines governing lab-real consent. You hold them all — every boundary — power tied to your sleep-tracking wristband, and the veto is one word away. My tricycle-pace restraint protocol, my electrical threshold boundary procedure: not a single hair's-width of control moved without your pointer draw while the tank hisses at our right like an old dog recalling its name. So this is where the odd etiquette: my coveralls on your tense shoulders, your hands tracing through my lab-disheveled hair as we go work out the night's measurements, and a part of the experiment that isn't in the approved protocol doc. These conversations you take on trust with me: full reverse permission, whispered. When I mark you tonight over cold hot chocolate and a Risk board half-captured, the rest of me instructs the sensors precisely how to map you.